Sunday, November 29, 2015

I'm no social scientist. Seeing as how I'm sitting here alone on a Saturday night, drinking by myself, you could argue that I'm barely social. But I do fancy myself a connoisseur of common sense, a student of simplicity, an observer of the obvious. (An asshole for alliteration, even.)

For my money, nobody's answer is better than the one recently offered by Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case. Their recent study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this month, details a sharp increase in the mortality rate for white men and women 45 to 54 years old with less than a college education between 1999 and 2013. According to the Washington Post, "An increase in the mortality rate for any large demographic group in an advanced nation has been virtually unheard of in recent decades, with the exception of Russian men after the collapse of the Soviet Union."

More ominously, and perhaps more telling in terms of the broader societal implication, is the authors' hypothesis for the cause of increased mortality rates for a group that makes up nearly 40% of the U.S. population. Noting that the rise in mortality for the demographic cohort in question is driven by drug and alcohol-related illness and increased suicide rates, Deaton and Case surmise that financial strain is the culprit. As Olga Khazan explains in The Atlantic, "Jobs in fields like manufacturing and construction, which were historically filled by people without college degrees, have been evaporating quickly over the past 15 years. [L]ess-educated people are more likely to be unemployed and to make less, so they struggle to afford things like therapy, gym memberships, and recreation that isn’t drugs. Without jobs, they may lack the social networks and sense of purpose that have shown to reduce mortality.

Nearly half of Americans in their 40s and 50s don’t have enough money saved for retirement to live as they’re accustomed to, even if they work until they’re 65. All of this is crashing down on Boomers, who were raised on the promise of the American Dream."

Deaton sums up his findings simply and starkly, saying that "half a million people are dead who should not be dead."

A generation of Americans may not be aware as a group of these statistics, but they're certainly individually cognizant of the fact that their friends are dying, and of a sense of demographic despair. At the same time, they lack a voice, something that's the province of the elites, the degreed, the financially secure. They're scared, and they're pissed, and they're lashing out at a world that's operating under new rules.

And it's hard to blame them for what's a genuinely human response to a brutally real, personally frightening, and seemingly intractable problem.

There are no easy answers here. The perfect storm of generational anxiety and political opportunism predicts a bleak 2016 presidential campaign.

zman may well be aware of this, but i wasn't. andy murray just won the deciding match to give great britain its first davis cup win since 1936. that murray cat's going to go down as a legend on his home island.

Speaking of rallies, when you take into account 2 of my pre-season prop bets with the jags making playoffs and nd winning it all, I went 1-9-1 last week on wagers. I defy anyone to do the same over 11 bets. You can't do it. The good news....I can get it all back tonight.

Anybody watch the end of the MNF game? I saw only the last few plays. Insane ending. Did they review the TD? His foot was very close to being out. And for a league of refs that virtually never let a punt go by without whistling a block in the back, they missed a game changing one there. Eh, Ravens Browns. Nobody's watching, anyway.